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In the Emerald Isle

Hello! We made it here safely on Saturday morning!!!! There was tons of delays and cancellations going on with our flights due to bad weather in Pennsylvania , so we were switched to an Aer Lingus direct flight from Chicago to Dublin. Even though we had to be at the Chicago Airport for so long, it was nice to just have a direct flight.

The weather has been beautiful here. Everyone seems worried that these few nice days will be their summer. One of the guys here told us a joke saying, "Our summer was beautiful last year, I think it was on a Tuesday". haha

We visited a cathedral in Drogheda where they have the head of St. Oliver displayed. He was a martyr. The crazy thing about it is that we were amazed of how similar this cathedral was to the temples that we visited in Taiwan. In Taiwan you can pay the temple for a light that will shine and will be like a continual prayer to that certain god. Well, in this cathedral they had shrines to certain saints and had candles for sale that you could light and be your continual prayer to that saint. It was crazy. The catholic church here in Ireland is not like the ones in the states. Very different.

We were able to walk around Drogheda and look at 3 different grocery stores for prices and just be able to see the town. They had a Saturday morning open air market in one of the streets where you could buy just about anything you needed. The three grocery stores were in malls, which was different. For a town of 40,000 people it seemed like there was a lot of shopping available. Stephen and I both realized that a long with having to convert our US dollars into Euros, we really need to be able to learn our metric system as everything is in different sizes here. It is hard to compare what the prices are here to what they are in the states. All that I know is that it is more expensive here.

The church service at Drogheda Presbyterian Church was awesome. It was very traditional, but relaxed. There are a lot of kids in the church and it is very diverse. The sermon was great and the songs were great (and yes, we did sing "Be Thou My Vision"). We filmed small portions of it, so once we get those uploaded you will be able to see what it was like.

We are now on the western side of Ireland in Castlebar, County Mayo. We will be here until Tuesday, visiting with Paudge & Emer, and seeing the need here.